DETAILS

Jingle Bell Rock 2008 with Metric, Tokyo Police Club, The Dears, Sebastien Grainger & The Mountains and DJ Mike Relm SECOND SHOW ADDED
MacEwan Hall
None
Friday, December 19 - Friday, December 19 Thursday, December 18 - Thursday, December 18

More in: Rock / Pop

Sometimes, the only way to fix a band is to call it quits and start over from scratch. That certainly seems to be the case for Death From Above 1979, the hard-rocking duo who burst onto the scene in 2004. Leading up to their acrimonious breakup in 2006, instrumentalist Jesse Keeler had already started clawing his way towards the top of the indie-electro pile as MSTRKRFT. Meanwhile, drummer and vocalist Sebastien Grainger, the focal point of DFA’s repertoire of brash sonic assault, played his cards close to his chest, quietly signing last summer with Saddle Creek to make a solo record geared towards a more traditional brand of rock ’n’ roll. The shift in style was hardly the biggest change for Grainger, who had struggled with DFA’s tandem songwriting duties.

“[DFA] was locked into the two-piece format, and we had an unspoken work method that was as creative as it was stifling,” he recalls. “You know, there were no songs unless Jesse brought riffs to the band, and that’s just the way it was. Maybe I could’ve written something and brought it to the table, but that’s not how it worked, and it never happened, so if he wasn’t writing, then I wasn’t writing. And it made for a major creative lull that lasted probably two years.”

That lull came to an end this October with the release of Sebastien Grainger & the Mountains. While the title suggests a new, potentially frustrating collaboration, fans can rest assured that this project is a distinctly individual effort — members of a long-standing live band remain part of the equation, but Grainger is the dominant creative force.

“I didn’t want it to be a solo record in the sense of me sitting around, playing one instrument and singing,” he says. “I wanted it to be at least a band-sounding record. So we took a few stabs at it as a band and some of those versions remain on the record. In other cases, sometimes I couldn’t involve other people at four in the morning or whenever it was that I felt like working. So the whole thing was an exercise in refining how I work, and the band was there along the way, either to play on the record or to give me feedback or, through live performances, to inform the way the record turned out.”

While the new trajectory is a major departure from Grainger’s musical past, it retains certain elements of DFA that Keeler has apparently chosen to forgo — MSTRKRFT plays almost exclusively at nightclubs that turn away the all-ages crowd that originally embraced DFA. In stark contrast, Grainger has positioned himself to appeal to fans across the board, releasing an album that leans towards edgy-but-catchy hooks and away from lewd or profane lyrics that could close the door on sales to the lucrative teen market.

This friendlier approach won’t hurt Grainger’s first cross-Canada trek, an all-ages affair with Metric, another band that enjoys broad success without churning out typical Top 40 dreck. In the wake of the upcoming pair of shows, don’t be surprised to see DFA’s trademark “elephant heads” shirts exchanged for apparel sporting Grainger’s self-styled crest, a bizarre affair featuring spoons, vultures and a hybrid of the Quebec flag and the Union Jack.

“That logo was an adaptation of a really fucked up dream I had one time,” explains an amused Grainger. “It was a super-frightening but highly sexually charged dream where I was staring at this 3D coat-of-arms that extended... kind of like a train coming at you, but there were all these different elements to it. And when I woke up, it was just the most shocking sensation I’d ever had — it was such a vivid, cinematic dream.... So it was kind of this convoluted path, but it began with this super-intense dream that I refer to as ‘the fear-gasm,’ then ended up as this really bizarre, cute, funny, weird, pervy logo.”